Many people are quick to credit the golden age of modern horror (roughly from 1968's Night of the Living Dead to 1978's Dawn of the Dead) to a culture-wide slackening of taboos that allowed directors to show the full effects of violence rather than cut away with melodramatic music, but less-discussed is the double-header of AIDS and Reaganism that rapidly eroded the rebellious spirit that birthed a genre as we know it. Granted, Roadkill was made for basic cable (and was thus subject to certain programming restrictions), and can hardly be blamed for initiating any deleterious trends, but if there's a single phrase that can describe its approach to drunken sex and body bisecting, it's inhibited. It's not that creature films back in the day were any smarter, but there was at least a vigor in their bloodlust that reflected that of the creatures they were tailing. Here, you're lucky if you can find a pulse.
In Ireland, like apparently everywhere in Europe, there are gypsies (who are correctly referred to as Roma, but that hasn't caught on for some reason) running around everywhere, just itching to put curses on anybody that so much as looks at them sideways. One of their favorite curses is to sic these pterodactyl-like creatures (but with a more gaping maw and flesh that appears to be uncontained by skin) on their victims, who always cross gypsies in entirely accidental ways, but are unprotected by their apparent complete lack of higher-level reasoning and basic human compassion. It should be noted that the horror film hat details the constant persecution of the Roma at the hands of European authorities (the French government recently shipped them out to Romania by train, eerily recalling earlier transgressions), but that's somewhat beside the point here. Another group of photogenic collegiates head out on holiday to look at castles, accidentally run over one of the gypsies, and are then menaced by these awful creatures.
You should know the play-by-play: group (led by two white former flames assisted by minority friends and comic relief to better reflect a college brochure) heads out of familiar territory, then has to resort to most base, animal instincts in order to survive. The Irish setting is novel, but the imagery (blood stains across perfectly slicked back hair) is familiar to anyone who saw The Descent, or even Jurassic Park. There's a nice appearance by Stephen Rea, who has saved many, many films (V for Vendetta not being the least of them) with his benign but forceful presence, but it is all too brief and thankless. Really, the majority of the time that the kids aren't being pursued by ravenous bird creatures, they're agonizing over the awkward, twenty-something politics of exes and the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. Crossfire is perhaps too strong a word here, but it matches the gravity with which all of these people treat it. Something that don't do is screw each other with the abandon of wild lemmings, which would have been a lot more exciting.
Does that make it bad? Perhaps not inherently, but what distinguished so many horror films of what we later designated as a golden age is the glee that they took in setting up their shallow characters only to vivisect them, cutting them wide open in order to expose them for the dregs of humanity that they are. The template remains the same, but the difference is qualitative rather than quantitative. The full measure of horror films has always been taken in their visceral impact, and if you're not going to relish both the bacchanalia and the slaughter that follows, you're going to end up with a fairly unsatisfying experience. Roadkill is oddly punctuated by scenes of apparently sincere emotion, and even the occasional acoustic guitar backing, setting a tone that is meek and unimposing even as it foreshadows murder to come. But, and most damning of all, these sequences don't strike an off-key note when juxtaposed with the violence that Roadkill is prepared to show us.
DVD Bonus Features
None.
"Roadkill" is on sale August 30, 2011 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Johannes Roberts. Written by Rick Suvalle. Starring Eliza Bennett, Stephen Rea, Kacey Barnfield, Kobna Holdbrook Smith, Colin Maher, Diarmuid Noyes, Eve Macklin.
